Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

On July 23, 1985, Commodore introduced its Amiga 1000 computer. And let’s just say the world wasn’t ready for it yet. Dave Haynie, a Commodore engineer who worked on the later models, has said there was no such thing as a 1980s computer. There were 1970s computers and 1990s computers, and it was the Amiga that dragged the rest of the industry into the 1990s.

It is not hyperbole to say the Amiga 1000 was 10 years ahead of its time. Its custom chipset had color graphics with up to 4,096 colors, stereo sound, a graphical user interface. Its operating system had full preemptive multitasking. The combination of the chipset and the operating system meant it could run on a Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 7.14 megahertz and 256 KB of RAM. And it could boot and run off a single floppy drive. Amiga demonstrated it in January 1984, when the chips existed only as prototype circuit boards. By the end of 1985, it was a shipping product.

Realistically, an ideal configuration had dual floppy drives and 512k of RAM, and a megabyte was a lot nicer.

But dual floppies and a meg of RAM wasn’t an outlandish machine in 1985, and in that configuration, it was smooth and pleasant to use. Commodore commissioned artist Andy Warhol to demonstrate it by using it to create digital art to show off its capabilities.

Multitasking: The Amiga 1000’s secret

Graphical user interfaces weren’t exactly new in the summer of 1985. Apple had introduced the Macintosh about a year and a half earlier, and the Lisa predated even that by a nearly a year. Atari released its ST computer three months before the Amiga, and the ST also had a graphical operating system with a mouse and color.

It was multitasking that put the Amiga on the map. And it wasn’t the cooperative multitasking that Windows 3.0 and 3.1 did or Apple System 7 did. It was full preemptive multitasking like Windows 95. The only thing Windows NT did that the Amiga didn’t was memory protection.

The Amiga’s operating system wasn’t based on Unix and it certainly wasn’t based on Windows NT. Its direct ancestor was an operating system called TRIPOS that originated at Cambridge University.

Adding memory protection would have been a nice touch, but the additional required hardware would have increased costs. And the Amiga at its debut was not exactly inexpensive. The base system cost $1,295 without a monitor. A color monitor, which you definitely wanted, cost another $300. Add the additional memory and a second floppy drive for another $150 to $200 each, and you soon learned the Amiga you really wanted was more like a $2,000 computer. Living in the future was expensive, but compared to the $2,495 Apple wanted for a less capable machine, the price wasn’t unreasonable.

Living with an Amiga

I’m not sure I even saw an Amiga in person until 1987, but I knew just from reading about it that I wanted one. I wasn’t able to make it happen until 1991, so I was pretty late to the game. But even in 1991, an Amiga felt like living in the future. I could load several programs and switch between them effortlessly, with the only limit being the amount of memory I had. I could connect to a BBS with a terminal program, start a download, then switch it to the background, fire up a word processor, and do my homework while the download was happening. In some cases, I could even fire up a game and play a game while a download happened in the background. I could download stuff while I played Civilization, which was pretty great.

Initially, the Amiga had a reputation for being unstable. But that was largely because early Amiga software wasn’t very well written. Amiga software was prone to ask for resources, and assume the resources were available. Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic. Except it was red, not blue.

But it wasn’t long before the software developers learned how to write code that behaved in this brave new world. Certainly by the time I was in the scene in 1991, the software generally behaved very well. When I bought a Windows PC in 1994, it felt like a serious downgrade. If I treated it like an Amiga and launched a terminal program, connected to a BBS, started download, and then switched over to Microsoft Word, it didn’t always work reliably. More often than not it was fine. But something would crash often enough to make me hesitate doing something I took for granted on an Amiga.

People ask me all the time when PCs caught up. It didn’t happen all at once. And it wasn’t until 1995 that all the pieces were there.

Why the Amiga makes me mad

And that’s why I almost everything about the Amiga makes me mad. With a good product marketing team behind it, it would have been the greatest computer of all time. When anyone asks its engineers why they built it, they tell you things like they wanted to build the very best computer that they could with the technology that was available to them at the time. That’s how engineers think, so it’s a perfectly good answer, engineer to engineer. But that answer doesn’t sell. You have to come up with something about wanting to change the world. And you have to word it in a way that sounds believable if you are going to attract a mass audience. Apple does that very well. Microsoft was never as good at it, but they were better at it than Commodore.

Commodore didn’t have a Steve Jobs or even a Steve Ballmer. They had an oligarch named Irving Gould who was only interested in looting as much from the company as possible as he ran it into the ground. It is a testament to the quality of the product Commodore had that it took him a decade to do it after Jack Tramiel left the company and left him unchecked to rob it blind.

Commodore ran a few ads, but it was clear from their advertising they had no idea what they were selling. The most effective marketers were the people who bought one. Sit down for an hour with an Amiga and someone who knew how to use it, and you’d want one too. But there weren’t enough of us to sustain the platform or the company.

How the Amiga 1000 and its successors were like a kick in the face

Commodore went bankrupt less than 9 years after introducing the first Amiga. And the company they sold it to went out of business about 15 months after buying it. So instead of getting the greatest computer of all time, it felt like we were getting kicked in the face repeatedly. And then we tried to switch to Apple or Microsoft, and waiting years for them to catch up felt like getting kicked in the face by two people.

If you missed out on it, it sounds like I’m being overdramatic. I get it. Nobody knows exactly how many people got to experience it. In the end Commodore sold around 4.91 million Amigas, but at least in the United States, Amiga owners were prone to buy more than one. That makes it hard to say how many distinct owners the machine had. But the people who owned one and lived in the future waiting for the rest of the world to catch up know exactly what I’m talking about.